cthia wrote:Indeed. The atmosphere, though not exactly immediately dangerous because of its toxicity, as is Grayson, probably wouldn't be the model of healthy either. The black rain will cause all sorts of planetary problems and hazards. People might choose to relocate to get away from the freezing temperatures. For that reason alone, Sphinx most likely would receive the lion's share of the population, and Hexapumas would be well fed.

At any rate, the average Manticoran simply can't handle the Gryphon winters. And even if counter-grav would help alleviate the heavy environment, I'd imagine employment would be questionable on Gryphon for the most part. And you'd have to consider whether Manticoran citizens that may choose to leave the system altogether would continue to be subject to Manticoran taxes since they'd be out of the system for extended periods and most likely paying taxes in another system. A notion that would surely hurt the Manticoran economy.

The average North American could not survive a Minneapolis winter on their own, but visit there and you will only experience mild discomfort - Like our cities, any habitable area on Gryphon will be set up to coddle humans, despite the weather.

******RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."

The question was about the seat of government, not about the general population. I agree that the majority of the surviving population would be relocating to Gryphon/Sphinx/elsewhere as quickly as they could lift them out.

Despite the theoretical attack causing this tragedy, Manticore the planet is still a more strategically defensible position than Sphinx(nearer to the hyper limit) or Gryphon(inside a smaller hyper limit - and further away from the Junction).

A little atmospheric dust and nuclear winter isn't going to drive Elizabeth Winton off Manticore. It'd take something more like what happened to Calvin III to do that.

The domes I referred to are to house the Manticoran government, parliament, the Queen's palace, the Admiralty and so forth.

munroburton wrote:The question was about the seat of government, not about the general population. I agree that the majority of the surviving population would be relocating to Gryphon/Sphinx/elsewhere as quickly as they could lift them out.

Despite the theoretical attack causing this tragedy, Manticore the planet is still a more strategically defensible position than Sphinx(nearer to the hyper limit) or Gryphon(inside a smaller hyper limit - and further away from the Junction).

A little atmospheric dust and nuclear winter isn't going to drive Elizabeth Winton off Manticore. It'd take something more like what happened to Calvin III to do that.

The domes I referred to are to house the Manticoran government, parliament, the Queen's palace, the Admiralty and so forth.

If the Queen did relocate, that would cause some logistical problems for the navy charged with protecting the Queen. For that reason she probably wouldn't change systems.

Joan Rivers Time -- "Can we talk? Can we talk?"

If dark skinned people still have an aversion to the cold like they do here on earth, then there is no amount of coddling that'll do for Michelle for her to want to live on Gryphon. Heck, textev bears the difficulty of most people with Gryphon winters.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble.—cthia's father. Incident in ?Axiom of Common Sense

RFC, as everyone here is aware is a student of history, much of it British Empire history.

During the Blitz in WWII, the Royal Family (George VI, Elizabeth (Queen Mother), and kids) remained not only in Britain but in London, the primary focus of the Luftwaffe air campaign.

Knowing this and knowing how Himself developed the character of Elizabeth III (Soul of Steel) I cannot see her leaving the planet Mantacore let alone the system.

I could see some variation of other ideas including monroburton's about bringing in Grayson Skydomes to set up necessary environmental protection (either permanent or temporary) for that segment of the population too stiff necked to be run off their home world.

****

Just my opinion of course and probably not worth the paper it's not written on.

robert132 wrote:...bringing in Grayson Skydomes to set up necessary environmental protection (either permanent or temporary) for that segment of the population too stiff necked to be run off their home world.

I agree, Elizabeth would not leave Manticore -- unless she was the last to board the last evacuation ship.

FWIW...

Grayson Skydomes specializes in city-domes and large, farming, domes. There are plenty of native Manticore companies that can build smaller arcologiesand biodomes. There wouldn't be any real need to bring in Skydomes to seal up surviving buildings and build new sealed towers. Their specialty would come much later than any immediate survival concerns.

cthia wrote:Indeed. The atmosphere, though not exactly immediately dangerous because of its toxicity, as is Grayson, probably wouldn't be the model of healthy either. The black rain will cause all sorts of planetary problems and hazards. People might choose to relocate to get away from the freezing temperatures. For that reason alone, Sphinx most likely would receive the lion's share of the population, and Hexapumas would be well fed.

At any rate, the average Manticoran simply can't handle the Gryphon winters. And even if counter-grav would help alleviate the heavy environment, I'd imagine employment would be questionable on Gryphon for the most part. And you'd have to consider whether Manticoran citizens that may choose to leave the system altogether would continue to be subject to Manticoran taxes since they'd be out of the system for extended periods and most likely paying taxes in another system. A notion that would surely hurt the Manticoran economy.

At first there would be nasty rain but that part wouldn't last very long (nowhere near enough time for dome construction.) The real issue with an impact winter (or nuclear winter--it's the same forces at work) is fine dust in the stratosphere above the rain. Rain doesn't go up that high, dust that gets high enough comes down only by gravity and that's a very slow process if it's fine enough.

(Note that this is also why things like the oil fires of Desert Storm weren't an issue--while the amount of crud released would have been serious if it had been in the stratosphere but that takes an extremely energetic event--large hydrogen bomb or higher. Yes, the smoke comes later--but the detonation sets up circulation into the stratosphere and the smoke goes up it.)

Loren Pechtel wrote:(Note that this is also why things like the oil fires of Desert Storm weren't an issue--while the amount of crud released would have been serious if it had been in the stratosphere but that takes an extremely energetic event--large hydrogen bomb or higher. Yes, the smoke comes later--but the detonation sets up circulation into the stratosphere and the smoke goes up it.)

Yes.

Of course, that wasn't what most 'climate experts' predicted:"On January 10, 1991, a paper appearing in the Journal Nature, stated Paul Crutzen's calculations that the setting alight of the Kuwait oil wells would produce a "nuclear winter", with a cloud of smoke covering half of the Northern Hemisphere after 100 days had passed and beneath the cloud, temperatures would be reduced by 5-10 Celsius.[34] This was followed by articles printed in the Wilmington morning star and the Baltimore Sun newspapers in mid to late January 1991, with the popular TV scientist personality of the time, Carl Sagan, who was also the co-author of the first few nuclear winter papers along with Richard P. Turco, John W. Birks, Alan Robock and Paul Crutzen together collectively stated that they expected catastrophic nuclear winter like effects with continental sized impacts of "sub-freezing" temperatures as a result of if the Iraqis went through with their threats of igniting 300 to 500 pressurized oil wells and they burned for a few months."

cthia wrote:Indeed. The atmosphere, though not exactly immediately dangerous because of its toxicity, as is Grayson, probably wouldn't be the model of healthy either. The black rain will cause all sorts of planetary problems and hazards. People might choose to relocate to get away from the freezing temperatures. For that reason alone, Sphinx most likely would receive the lion's share of the population, and Hexapumas would be well fed.

At any rate, the average Manticoran simply can't handle the Gryphon winters. And even if counter-grav would help alleviate the heavy environment, I'd imagine employment would be questionable on Gryphon for the most part. And you'd have to consider whether Manticoran citizens that may choose to leave the system altogether would continue to be subject to Manticoran taxes since they'd be out of the system for extended periods and most likely paying taxes in another system. A notion that would surely hurt the Manticoran economy.

At first there would be nasty rain but that part wouldn't last very long (nowhere near enough time for dome construction.) The real issue with an impact winter (or nuclear winter--it's the same forces at work) is fine dust in the stratosphere above the rain. Rain doesn't go up that high, dust that gets high enough comes down only by gravity and that's a very slow process if it's fine enough.

(Note that this is also why things like the oil fires of Desert Storm weren't an issue--while the amount of crud released would have been serious if it had been in the stratosphere but that takes an extremely energetic event--large hydrogen bomb or higher. Yes, the smoke comes later--but the detonation sets up circulation into the stratosphere and the smoke goes up it.)

An exceptionally violent volcanic eruption can also get fine rock dust into the stratosphere--see the Krakatoa explosions of August 26–27, 1883 for an example.

-------------------------------------------------------------History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.

Loren Pechtel wrote:At first there would be nasty rain but that part wouldn't last very long (nowhere near enough time for dome construction.) The real issue with an impact winter (or nuclear winter--it's the same forces at work) is fine dust in the stratosphere above the rain. Rain doesn't go up that high, dust that gets high enough comes down only by gravity and that's a very slow process if it's fine enough.

(Note that this is also why things like the oil fires of Desert Storm weren't an issue--while the amount of crud released would have been serious if it had been in the stratosphere but that takes an extremely energetic event--large hydrogen bomb or higher. Yes, the smoke comes later--but the detonation sets up circulation into the stratosphere and the smoke goes up it.)

An exceptionally violent volcanic eruption can also get fine rock dust into the stratosphere--see the Krakatoa explosions of August 26–27, 1883 for an example.

And an exceptionally violent eruption isn't "large hydrogen bomb or higher"?? I was talking total energy, not specifically fusion or antimatter. After all, we are talking about an impact winter, that doesn't have the energy density of fusion unless you're talking about an MDM whacking a planet.

Loren Pechtel wrote:At first there would be nasty rain but that part wouldn't last very long (nowhere near enough time for dome construction.) The real issue with an impact winter (or nuclear winter--it's the same forces at work) is fine dust in the stratosphere above the rain. Rain doesn't go up that high, dust that gets high enough comes down only by gravity and that's a very slow process if it's fine enough.

(Note that this is also why things like the oil fires of Desert Storm weren't an issue--while the amount of crud released would have been serious if it had been in the stratosphere but that takes an extremely energetic event--large hydrogen bomb or higher. Yes, the smoke comes later--but the detonation sets up circulation into the stratosphere and the smoke goes up it.)

Vince wrote:An exceptionally violent volcanic eruption can also get fine rock dust into the stratosphere--see the Krakatoa explosions of August 26–27, 1883 for an example.

Loren Pechtel wrote:And an exceptionally violent eruption isn't "large hydrogen bomb or higher"?? I was talking total energy, not specifically fusion or antimatter. After all, we are talking about an impact winter, that doesn't have the energy density of fusion unless you're talking about an MDM whacking a planet.

As you point out, it is energy density that matters, not total energy. Thunderstorms release more energy than nuclear weapons, but they do so over a much larger period of time, lowering the density. Someone ran some numbers on the energy released by both: How does the energy of a thunderstorm compare with a nuclear bomb? And that's just with a typical or exceptionally large thunderstorm, hurricanes/typhoons/tropical cyclones release much more energy.

As for impacts, the Earth* gets hit by a meteor impact about once a year that equals the amount of energy of the Hiroshima bomb. The Tunguska event energy was equal to that of a hydrogen bomb: Meteor and asteroid impacts.

* Actually the atmosphere--most of the meteors burn up too high to have surface impact effects.

-------------------------------------------------------------History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.